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Review Of Willa Cather Remembered Edited By Sharon Hoover, Mark Madigan

Great Plains Quarterly

This welcome addition to Willa Cather scholarship is composed of forty-five reminiscences of the author by friends and professional associates documenting key stages of her personal life and literary career. While there is little here that has not been published before, Cather specialists will nonetheless want to add Willa Cather Remembered to their libraries. What makes the volume so appealing is that it collects important biographical material previously available only in miscellaneous sources. The legal restriction on publishing or even quoting excerpts from Cather's letters makes scholarship such as this all the more important. General readers with an interest in …

Title And Contents- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Summer 2003 Volume 23 Number 3

CONTENTS

BLACK ENCLAVES OF VIOLENCE: RACE AND HOMICIDE IN GREAT PLAINS CITIES, 1890-1920
Clare V. McKanna Jr.

WILLA CATHER'S RELUCTANT NEW WOMAN PIONEER
Reginald Dyck

THE CUPS OF BLOOD ARE EMPTIED: PIETISM AND CULTURAL HERITAGE IN TWO DANISH IMMIGRANT SCHOOLS ON THE GREAT PLAINS
John Mark Nielsen

REVIEW ESSAY: DO GERMANS REALLY LOVE INDIANS?
Peter Bolz and Ann Davis
A review of Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of Once Upon A Town: The Miracle Of The North Platte Canteen By Bob Greene, Charles A. Peek

Great Plains Quarterly

Bob Greene interweaves narratives of sojourns in North Platte, local history, and stories of the Canteen culled from interviews (often tearful, one calling him to go on record the day before surgery) with those who served there and those who were served, a distinction that in the end blurs.

The story of the Canteen itself captures folks from a hundred and twenty-five communities in Nebraska and eastern Colorado, "Some ... you can't even find on a map, sixty years later," meeting up to 8,000 troops a day, carried on up to thirty-two trains a day, each stopping "as long as …

Book Notes- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly

Book Notes

The Definitive10urnals of Lewis and Clark: Seven Volume Set

The Diaries of John Gregory Bourke: Volume One, November 20, l872-July 28, 1876

A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather

Westward Expansion

Chinese on the American Frontier

Bravo of the Brazos: John Larn of Fort Griffin, Texas

The Human Tradition in Texas

A Thousand Miles of Prairie: The Manitoba Historical Society and the History of Western Canada

Museums and Historic Sites of the American West

Edmonton: Stories from the River City

Guide to the Photographs in the Western History Collections of the University of Oklahoma

Building for the …

Review Of Gold Rush: The Black Hills Story Compiled By John D. Mcdermott, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

The Black Hills Gold Rush, instigated by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's 1874 expedition to the Hills confirming that there was gold there "among the roots of the grass," was an event important to both the nation and the future state of South Dakota, not to mention to the Native Americans who had inhabited the area for centuries. Watson Parker's Gold in the Black Hills (1966) provided an excellent account of the gold rush, and John D. McDermott, the compiler and one of the authors of this volume, acknowledges his pioneering work on the subject. This collection of essays succeeds …

Review Of Germans And Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections Edited By Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemiinden, And Susanne Zantop, Peter Bolz, Ann Davis

Great Plains Quarterly

DO GERMANS REALLY LOVE INDIANS?

"Of all Europeans, the German has the greatest love for the Indian." This 1939 quote from a German novelist, reproduced in the book's introductory chapter by Christian Feest, could serve as the motto for the 1999 conference ("Germans and Indians/Indians and Germans: Cultural Encounters across Three Centuries") held at Dartmouth College, from which this book evolved. The idea that Germans have a special affinity with Indians is a long-standing conviction that is, nonetheless, difficult to prove. But the converse, that Indians might have a special affinity for Germans, was disproven by the conference itself: only …

Review Of Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays On The American West By Larry Mcmurtry, Shirley A. Leckie

Great Plains Quarterly

In these essays, originally published in the New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry examines Western writers as mythmakers. Overall, however, his most interesting pieces are those in which he pays tribute to authors who have influenced his own work or have left behind literary treasures he finds moving and wise.

One of the essays is devoted to historian Angie Debo and her influence on McMurtry's development as a writer. As a youth he accidentally found The Road to Disappearance (1941), her history of the Creek Indians, and discovered that Debo, from neighboring Oklahoma, had made for herself a …

Review Of Feathering Custer By W. S. Penn, Joshua B. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly

William S. Penn (Nez Perce) has compiled a series of essays that twirl through problems concerning Native American studies in academia. In "Paving with Good Intentions" and elsewhere, Penn takes aim at popular critical theory that cannot adequately conceptualize Native thought, identity, or writing. Throughout, he advocates careful scrutiny of elements of identity arising from forces outside of Indian culture.

In Kenneth Burke's metaphor comparing the field of cultural criticism to a parlor discussion, Penn sees much of what limits the study: the conversation quashes dissent and honors hegemony; the conversers privilege the written over the oral and are almost …

Review Of The American Midwest: Essays On Regional History Edited By Andrew R. L. Cayton And Susan E. Gray, Paula Petrik

Great Plains Quarterly

While the South, West, and New England have always possessed distinctive regional identities, the Middle West has been either a substitute for national character or described variously as "dull," "ordinary," or just plain "nice." Yet, as the essayists point out, the Midwest is both homogenous and diverse. Beginning with an excellent introduction that summarizes the historiography of the idea of the Middle West as a region, the ten essays in the collection seek both to explore more deeply the idea and construction of the Middle West as a region and to provide case studies in the development of the concept. …

Review Of Local Wonders: Seasons In The Bohemian Alps By Ted Kooser, Judith Sorenberger

Great Plains Quarterly

It's no wonder that the title of Ted Kooser's first book of nonfiction prose should share the word "local" with his first volume of poems, A Local Habitation and a Name (1974), for place is always central in Kooser's writing. The locale of Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps is Kooser's land north of the village of Garland, Nebraska, where he lives with his wife; two dogs, and an indeterminate number of chickens.

Kooser claims this land as his place in several ways. First, he does a lot of looking: at old buildings, wild roses, animals, people. And he …

Review Of The Professor's House By Willa Cather, Steven Trout

Great Plains Quarterly

Although less familiar to most readers than O Pioneers!, My Antonia, or Death Comes the Archbishop, The Professor's House (1925) is arguably Willa Cather's most important novel of the 1920s. Thematically, the book is exceptionally far ranging. As Cather's closest approach to a novel of the Jazz Age, The Professor's House offers a portrait of conspicuous consumption occasionally reminiscent of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. As a portrait of post-World-War-I disillusionment, the novel bears comparison with Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. And then there is the narrative's timely concern with the health of American higher education, especially the Liberal …

Willa Cather's Reluctant New Woman Pioneer, Reginald Dyck

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1913 Willa Cather created a female protagonist who is single, independent, entrepreneurial, managerial, strong willed, wealthy and in love with the land of south-central Nebraska. This character offered a new vision for women at the turn of the twentieth century. Cather's fictional construction of gender, as well as her own experience, embody the contradictions present in the roles society offered women. One can read O Pioneers! as a cultural seismometer, one that picks up tremors along various social fault lines and then expresses them within a particular framework held by many people of her economic and social position. This …

The Cups Of Blood Are Emptied Pietism And Cultural Heritage In Two Danish Immigrant Schools On The Great Plains, John Mark Nielsen

Great Plains Quarterly

Following the American Civil War, the vast sweep of the Great Plains exerted a powerful force on the imagination of Americans and Northern European immigrants, resulting in a period of rapid settlement. Immigrant communities in particular attempted to establish institutions through which their language, beliefs and cultural heritage might be preserved. The history of these immigrant institutions mirrors the challenges immigrant communities faced in confronting not only the vicissitudes of climate and evolving economic conditions but also the pressures of assimilation.

Numerous works of both fiction and nonfiction explore the broader challenges of life in the Great Plains; none captures …

Review Of Comanche Society; Before The Reservation By Gerald Betty, Daniel J. Gelo

Great Plains Quarterly

While the merging of historical and anthropological outlooks has been a productive trend in Plains Indian studies, there are pitfalls. For one, the authority inherent in an accurate chronology or lively narrative can mask basic errors in social analysis. Sometimes historians have difficulty in properly employing the terms and principles of social organization so carefully wrought in the neighbor discipline. Readers get an epic infused with mistaken ethnology, resulting in a setback rather than advance in understanding.

So it is with Gerald Betty's Comanche Society. The work attempts to recast the history of Comanche expansion via chapters on kinship, …

Book Notes- Spring 2003

Great Plains Quarterly

Dictionary of Midwestern Literature. Volume One: The Authors

The University of Manitoba: An Illustrated History

Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews

Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education

Petticoat Prisoners of Old Wyoming

Minister to the Cherokees: A Civil War Autobiography

Review Of How Should I Read These?: Native Women Writers In Canada By Helen Hoy, Dee Horne

Great Plains Quarterly

Helen Hoy opens with a quotation from Eden Robinson's short story "Queen of the North" in which a non-Native asks, "How should I eat these?" The response is, "With your mouth, asshole." Hoy poses challenges of reading and understanding Jeannette Armstrong's Slash, Maria Campbell and Linda Griffith's The Book of Jessica, Ruby Slipperjack's Honour the Sun, Beatrice Culleton's In Search of April Raintree, Beverly Hungry Walf's The Ways of My Grandmothers, Lee Maracle's Ravensong, and Eden Robinson's Traplines. She articulates her position carefully, presenting a scholarly argument that frequently cites the critical and theoretical perspectives …

Review Of West Of The American Dream: An Encounter With Texas By Paul Christensen, Roger Jones

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1974, fresh from his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, poet and critic Paul Christensen set out for his first teaching job, in College Station, Texas, at Texas A&M. Eastern by education and temperament, and as yet unsteeped in Texas culture, Texas literature, or Texas landscape, Christensen was somewhat uncertain about what to expect in his new setting. Almost thirty years later, however (and still at Texas A&M), Christensen now looks back on the years and on his own experiences in West of the American Dream, a rich, wide-ranging, evocative work combining his critical eye for the …

Review Of Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains And Removed Indians In Indian Territory By David Lavere, Willard Hughes Rollings

Great Plains Quarterly

Many are aware of Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal policy, which uprooted Native Americans from their homelands and drove them into Indian Territory. Few, however, are aware of the other side of removal, that is, the impact of the removed tribes on the Prairie and Plains peoples living in the region of the relocation. Removal crowded thousands of Indian people of diverse cultures onto land that could not adequately support them, resulting in bitter conflicts between the Native peoples of the Southern Plains and the invading eastern strangers.

Those of us who are members of the tribes involved as well as …

Review Of Common And Contested Ground: A Human And Environmental History Of The Northwestern Plains By Theodore Binnema, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly

Theodore Binnema's engaging ethnohistorical account of the peoples who once lived upon the Northwestern Plains is an excellent study in human relationships. Organized in a straightforward manner, its first two chapters explore the ecosystems of the Northwestern Plains and how hunters developed their techniques over thousands of years. Next, Binnema recreates the trade systems and routes in the protohistorical period and offers a sensitive analysis of the evidence for warfare on the Plains prior to the appearance of horses. Based upon careful research in the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company, he recreates the economic and social intricacies of the …

Review Of The Black Regulars, 1866-1898 By William A. Dobak And Thomas D. Phillips, Robert Wooster

Great Plains Quarterly

As part of its 1866 army reorganization bill, Congress, presuming that black troops would be less prone to desert than white soldiers, reserved six of the sixty regiments for black enlisted men. Although subsequent reductions allowed for only four such regiments in a forty-five- regiment army, the all-black units functioned as their sponsors had intended. Stationed largely in the West until 1898, the men of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry regiments deserted far less frequently and reenlisted far more often than their white comrades. Their story has often been told, but never with the comprehensiveness, …

Review Of Dreams And Thunder: Stories, Poems, And The Sun Dance Opera By Zitkala-Sa, Susan Bernardin

Great Plains Quarterly

This new collection of previously unpublished writing by Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) marks a milestone in the scholarship of this crucial figure in Native literary and intellectual history. Meticulously researched, editor Jane Hafen's compilation advances our understanding of this Yankton Sioux writer, activist, and artist, about whom little has been documented. Hafen located a range of her writings in a variety of archives, from early poems written at Earlham College to Iktomi stories and the opera she created in collaboration with William Hanson in 1913.

In her introduction, Hafen provides the most accurate biographical overview of Gertrude Bonnin to date, showing …

Review Of Beauty, Honor, And Tradition: The Legacy Of Plains Indian Shirts By Joseph D. Horse Capture And George P. Horse Capture, Imre Nagy

Great Plains Quarterly

The study of Plains Indian art is currently in a transitive stage. Because of the enthusiasm of several non-Native researchers and scholars in the eighties and nineties-like Norman Feder, Dennis Lessard, Richard Conn, John C. Ewers (just to name those who have already passed away)-the appreciation of Plains Indian beadwork and quillwork almost reached the highest levels of connoisseurship, and prices for these pieces rose to the stars. At the same time, our knowledge of tribal or regional styles clarified to a certain degree, and our vision became less obscured by centuryold misconceptions. The presence of Native American scholarship also …

''A Prairie Childhood" By Edith Abbott An Excerpt From The Children's Champion, A Biography Of Grace Abbott, John Sorensen

Great Plains Quarterly

Grace Abbott (1878-1939) is, perhaps, the greatest champion of children's rights in American history. She was a woman of intriguing contradictions: a life-long Republican Party member and a life-long liberal activist; a native of the Nebraska frontier who spent much of her life in the poorest immigrant quarters of urban Chicago; an unmarried woman who was nicknamed "the mother of America's forty-three million children."

Grace Abbott was a public figure who was both much adored and bitterly, sometimes vehemently, attacked. She was a born and bred pioneer: the first woman nominated for a Presidential cabinet post {secretary of labor for …

Review Of Racial Frontiers: Africans, Chinese, And Mexicans In Western America, 1848-1890 By Arnoldo De Leon, Sucheng Chan

Great Plains Quarterly

Arnoldo De Leon wrote this book to fill a gap in the existing literature on the American West that either "overlooks or is mindless about the contributions of Africans, Chinese, and Mexicans to the frontier experience." In his view, the presence of these nonwhite groups made the region a racial as well as a psychological frontier. In a short text of only 107 pages, he argues, in chapter 1, that these groups came because the frontier offered them opportunities not available in their homelands (though "homeland" is not entirely applicable to American-born blacks). That is, their motive for migrating to …

Notes And News- Spring 2003

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Native Perspectives on the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Call For Papers: Native American Perspectives Of The Lewis & Clark Expedition

Research Facilities: Museum of the Great Plains

Call For Papers: Missouri Valley History Conference

Come To The "Champagne Air" Changing Promotional Images Of The Kansas Climate, 1854 -1900, Karen De Bres

Great Plains Quarterly

Euro-American settlers poured into Kansas during the second half of the nineteenth century, and there they encountered a hostile and unpredictable climate. Rainfall patterns were erratic, and the extremes of temperature were both demanding and daunting. Countering these conditions, or at least tempering them, became a task for a variety of individuals and organizations. The work was straightforward: to transform the image of Kansas in order to attract prospective immigrants. As historian Carl Becker wrote, this was not easy: Until 1895 the whole history of the state was a series of disasters, and always something new, extreme, bizarre, until the …

Excerpts From The Lewis And Clark Journals: An Epic Of Discovery, The Abridgment Of The Definitive Nebraska Edition The Journey Across The Plains, Gary E. Moulton

Great Plains Quarterly

Chapter 1
Expedition Underway
May 14-August 24, 1804

May 14, 1804
[CLARK] I Set out at 4 o'Clock P. M. in the presence of many of the Neighboring inhabitants, and proceeded on under a gentle brease up the Missourie to the upper Point of the 1st Island 4 Miles and Camped on the Island which is Situated Close on the right (or Starboard) Side, and opposit the mouth of a Small Creek called Cold water,¹ a heavy rain this after-noon. [Camped in St. Charles County, Missouri, near and across from Fort Bellefontaine, St. Louis County.]

May 15, 1804
[CLARK] …

Title And Contents- Spring 2003

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Spring 2003 Vol. 23 No.2

CONTENTS

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Charles A. Braithwaite

EXCERPTS FROM THE LEWIS AND CLARK JOURNALS; AN EPIC OF DISCOVERY, THE ABRIDGMENT OF THE Definitive NEBRASKA EDITION; THE JOURNEY ACROSS THE PLAINS Gary E. Moulton

"A PRAIRIE CHILDHOOD" BY EDITH ABBOTT: AN EXCERPT FROM THE CHILDREN'S CHAMPION, A BIOGRAPHY OF GRACE ABBOTT John Sorensen

COME TO THE "CHAMPAGNE AIR": CHANGING PROMOTIONAL IMAGES OF THE KANSAS CLIMATE, 1854-1900 Karen De Bres

BOOK REVIEWS

Theodore Binnema Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains By JAMES E. SHEROW

Gerald Betty Comanche Society: …

Review Of Studies In American Indian Art: A Memorial Tribute To Norman Feder Edited By Christian F. Feest, Bill Anthes

Great Plains Quarterly

Norman Feder (1930-1995), a pioneer in the field of Native American art history and material culture, began his career in a community of amateur collectors and "artifakers" (Feder's term for serious hobbyists who produced high-quality reproductions of Indian crafts). His periodical, American Indian Hobbyist (begun in 1954 and renamed American Indian Tradition in 1960), spawned many careers in anthropology and Native American history. Later, Feder's professional experience included positions at the Denver Art Museum, the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian, and major exhibitions and catalogs at the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Feder served …

Review Of Performing The American Frontier, 1870-1906 By Roger A. Hall, Sarah J. Blackstone

Great Plains Quarterly

Roger Hall's engagingly written study of frontier drama provides a good overview of the topic. Covering the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of cinema, the book surveys how eastern audiences reacted to frontier depictions, examining these reactions against the backdrop of contemporary debates about national policies affecting the settlement of the West. Hall has limited his discussion to plays produced in New York, which allows him to take advantage of a wealth of theatrical documents, including reviews printed in New York newspapers and trade papers of the day. He takes into account the often …